It’s interesting to me that no matter how may times it happens, when you take a little time away, you always seem to take a step back. It’s as if you’re made to retrace steps to get back to where you left off.

It’s been a peculiar year that hasn’t lent itself to continuous growth and new ideas for me, that’s for sure. This can be seen in the latest two drawings presented here.

This first one is what I figure to be something I’d done over a year ago. It’s competent and it’s legible. For me, it just doesn’t represent the sort of stretch in a technical or conceptual aspect that I seemed to have enjoyed previously. I’d still show it and I kind of do enjoy some of the details within.

The second one, which is a different take on the same vista, I think satisfies the duality of conceptual and/or technical stretch I like to see.

To me, there’s a certain strength of gesture in the ‘strokes’ in the work. The places where these really start to shine are where the horizon line meets the sky. The finger-blending creates this sort of almost dream-state effect that warps things in the way we think dreams tend to be.

What was even more exciting was an earlier moment in this one’s creation where it was super-gestural. Those gestures were highly aligned. I should have stopped there, or at least documented it. I do remember the moment, so I can now work to at least create a version of that point, if not spend some time around the concept.